Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33-40.
Begins with witnessing her son’s “incipient literacy” as they struggle with names on baseball cards—trying to sound out, applying words they know. Many Trillo becomes Many Trails. Sam later uses baseball as his portal—he learns math through stats, about racism through the negro legues, about geography and aesthetic judgement through book and card info—reading.
Describes 1613 letter of an Indigenous Andean to King Phillip of Spain that lay undelivered and neglected in Copenhagen museum for 350 years.
Contact zone is a reference to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other. Often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths, as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.
Will use the term to reconsider the models of community that many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing and that are under challenge today.
Letter was written in two languages (Spanish and Quechua) 1200 pages long “First new Chronicle and Good Government” describes the chronicle of merging Incan and Christian history and describes incan life and tradition. Pratt calls this autoethnographic text. Carries idioms of the conqueror. A revisionist account of Spanish conquest, which the writer of the letter ar
Guamon Poma mirrors back to the Spanish (in their language which is alien to him) an image of themselves that they often suppress and will therefore surely recognize. Such are the dynamics of language writing and the representation in contact zones. –can apply to Gates, I say.
Argues and tries to shame Spanish into good conduct.
“Because it deploys European and Andean systems of meaning making, the letter means differently to bilingual Spanish-Quechua speakers and to monolingual speakers; the drawings mean differently to monocultural readers, Spanish or Andean, and to bicultural readers responding to the Andean symbolic structures embodied n European genres.
There was another letter, by a metizto, that was adoped and reprinted all around spain because it was non threatening and non alien.
Says old linguistic idea of speech communities as discrete falls short. Too utopian They bleed. \
Apply to classroom. To unrecognized genius and value in esl /outsider writing.
“our job in the Americas course remains to figure out how to mak that crossroads the best site for leaning that it can be. Looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone. Will include storytelling, interests, ideas, hobbies, interests,etc. The redemption of the oral ; ways for people to engage with suppressed aspects of history, including their own histories. –in opposition to XXX contention that encouraging oral continuation is dangerous.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33-40.